Letters: The costs of rebuilding

LETTERS

Published
5:30 am CDT, Wednesday, September 21, 2005

Calling all culpable

Both Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco and New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin might want to check their own "culpability" in response to the Katrina debacle in New Orleans. Their strategy appears to be one of complaining, posturing and blaming the "government" (but not theirs, of course). It seems clear that the first responders — the city and state — were figuratively and literally in over their heads from the start.

It is also interesting to note that Mike Brown, former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, got high marks on handling disasters for FEMA, including the Florida hurricane disasters last year. The only difference was that Florida's governor (Jeb Bush) and local officials seemed to know what it meant to be a first responder and got the job done without any "finger-pointing."

BOB ASHFIELD Houston

Let the unborn pay

Katrina will raise the budget deficit for 2006 to more than $500 billion, according to the conservative Heritage Foundation. That will add about $1,500 to the debt owed by every man, woman and child in the United States.

The Brookings Institution says foreign banks are eager to help finance our debt. China already has $900 billion in our IOUs. Our total debt exceeds $8 trillion. How much more can we borrow in the name of economic development? Don't worry, the unborn will pay
for it.

It's working for him

The massive Katrina recovery effort outlined by President Bush will be the mother of all pork barrels, but don't worry, because he is going to oversee everything and, along with the Republican Congress, will investigate the failure of the relief effort; which will, as usual, find that no one was responsible for anything.

It's working out great for Bush: His proposal makes him look compassionate, will further enrich his cronies, pushes the continuing catastrophe in Iraq off the front pages and digs the federal government so much deeper into debt (combined with further tax cuts) that it is approaching bankruptcy.

He'll then be able to turn most operations over to the private sector and say, "Mission accomplished."

Will shifts blame

George F. Will is obviously a well-educated person. However, being well-educated does not make him immune to spells of idiocy.

In his Sept. 13 Outlook column, "The type of thinking that Katrina didn't sweep away," Will commented on unwed black mothers in New Orleans with several children as a factor in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. This was a case where he was obviously suffering from idiocy.

What role did these women have in the levees breaking or in the cutting of funds for the repairs to the levees?

What role did they play in the Federal Emergency Management Agency's delayed response to hurricane victims or in the prevention of water and food from being dropped for the evacuees? He was obviously just trying to shift some of the blame for how this disaster was handled over to Katrina's victims.

JAMES A. JACKSON Missouri City

A nation's mortgage

Nobody ever says the world is coming to an end when a taxpayer obtains a mortgage to build a home, so what is the problem with the nation obtaining a mortgage to build New Orleans?

Learn from Cuba's response

In an effort to improve our emergency response to hurricanes and other disasters, it can be instructive to examine how other nations respond to emergencies. The most impressive hurricane evacuation planning and response anywhere has taken place in Cuba, where they have weathered some of the most violent storms that ever occurred in the Caribbean with very few lives lost.

Cuba recently was able to successfully evacuate 1.7 million people on very short notice when Hurricane Ivan struck last September. Even though the storm plowed through the island, Cuba didn't record a single death. The same month, Hurricane Jeanne killed more than 1,500 in Haiti, most drowning in floodwater.

Cuba's civil defense is organized on a national basis, but it is also embedded in the community, and people know ahead of time where they are to evacuate to. Whole communities evacuate together and bring many of their possessions with them.

In order to avoid suffering another catastrophe such as occurred when Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, we should consider emulating the pro-active Cuban approach to hurricane disaster planning.

CAROLINE HERZENBERG Chicago, Ill.

Time to end NASA bureaucracy

The Chronicle's Sept. 20 article "NASA aims for a return to moon by 2018" said that the
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
wants to return to the moon in 13 years even at the cost of $104 billion and with 1960s technology. It appears that NASA is suffering from what sociologists term the "means-ends inversion," which is where self-perpetuation takes precedence over any real goals or objectives the organization may have had. It has been years since the American tax-paying public has accrued any genuine benefit from NASA's program investments. Perhaps it is time to retire the NASA bureaucracy, bust it up into more manageable and nimble pieces, and start over with salient targets that provide tangible benefits to the American public that is funding these efforts. Maybe NASA could then again attract the "best and the brightest" to its ranks.

Rita's secret soon to be told

It shouldn't be a secret for too much longer. Hurricane Rita will strike somewhere along the Texas coast and it will make landfall as a major storm.

In the worst-case scenario, it will strike just south of Galveston, inundating the island and putting Houston on the nastiest side of the storm. As a lifelong resident of Houston, I know the city isn't ready for "the big one."

Gov. Rick Perry is about to be handed a challenge to step up and lead the disaster response. We can only hope that he's been doing his homework during the past three weeks.